Retail + Digital

Tag Archives: Lyst

Content curation, discovery commerce, delivery wars and disruptive retail futures were all on the agenda at the Wired Retail conference, held in London last week. With a host of inspirational speakers from digital and physical retail fields, a retail-tech marketplace, plus a stage dedicated to showcasing 16 of the magazine’s best start-ups in the retail-tech arena, it was a day full of insightful commentary.

The conference was supported by Valtech, a digital insights and marketing firm, that advised the audience to ‘orchestrate the consumer journey through new technologies’, said MD George Smith, in a keynote address.

Social curators hijack content to commerce

Content curation is the key path to commerce according to Runar Reistrup CEO of Depop (a snap and sell app that’s a hybrid of Instagram and eBay), who said retailers are now thinking like social media natives.

‘Depop works for retailers as a flash-sale m-commerce tool. ASOS comes to us to sell in the same social context as Depop users, who follow their favourite sellers,’ he said, adding that the social element to selling product on Depop makes it more fun and engaging for the retailer.

MyTheresa festive list on Lyst

Chris Morton, CEO of Lyst calls it ‘distribution commerce’. ‘In the beginning, content came to commerce, now we are beginning to see the opportunity when it’s the other way around. Content is shared around the web and it’s instant commerce via Twitter or magazines that have ‘buy it now’ buttons,’ he said. Social commerce is relevant to mobile because everything is consumed on mobile – content is everywhere, he added. ‘Mobile blends the online and offline worlds – but we need to personalise the experience in an app.’

‘This generation is the best equipped to curate their own style,’ said Amber Venz, CEO and founder of Reward Style, in one of the conference’s most engaging presentations.

RewardStyle’s Amber Venz presenting her Coveteur case study

‘Content creators are the social influencers of the era. There are 9000 content creators on Reward Style and all of them create actionable, organic content that leads to commerce,’ she says citing a recent project with luxury re-sale site Coveteur to make its content more shareable and instantly actionable.

She says through training this group of style bloggers they are directly influencing online sales to the tune of $270m in 2014, an increase of 174% from 2013. Venz said that at the top level, influencers with Reward Style are earning around $100,000 per month in commissions.

In 2013 Instagram became the most popular platform for RewardStyle bloggers, according to Venz who launched Liketoknow.it in April 2014, as a work around platform for driving commerce from posts on Instagram. ‘Liketoknow.it has been more impactful that all the other social platforms combined. It has driven 3% of the retail sales generated from Reward Style bloggers, since it started eight months ago,’ she says.

Users who like a post can get immediate, daily, weekly or monthly information from Liketoknow.it, ‘95% choose to receive right now’ says Venz who describes the latest way to shop as ‘discovery commerce’.

Editorial shoot on http://instagram.com/disneyrollergirl

Omnichannel journey

Instagram is undoubtedly contributing to a paradigm shift in the way people shop online. ‘Instagram is image-led retail,’ said Tracy Yaverbaun, head of brand development, EMEA at the Facebook-owned platform.

Consumers use Instagram for ‘snacking into tunnels of visual inspiration – they used to look through a magazine for that, now they do it on a small screen 24 hours a day,’ she said adding it’s like a transportation window that’s open all the time – ‘mobile is the new shop window.’ Yaverbaun said Instagram is now fusing the phygital and digital retail worlds, giving examples from Banana Republic and Topshop that have both used imagery from their Instagram feeds in window displays – playing to the highly engaged mobile consumer practice of walking into a store and asking for product they’ve seen on Instagram.

Banana Republic Instagram window by Victoria Waterman

Citing Instagram’s own research, Yaverbaun said 60% of users on Instagram engage with people or brands they don’t know, simply to take them to a place of inspiration or to find people with similar passions. Yaverbaun said the company does not have an immediate commerce strategy to implement just yet. ‘We feel to focus on inspiration first is the most important thing to do, then we figure out the rest later.’

According to Chris Morton, CEO of Lyst, desktop browsing is slowing for the first time, while mobile continues to go through the roof for shopping on the go. ‘Channels are being bundled together in customer journeys, it’s difficult to understand only desktop in the equation,’ he says adding mobile has become a device for snacking but an app is for shopping now.

Tablets have a higher conversion rate than mobile, says Morton. ‘It’s snacking verses intent on tablets, which is why we built a universal checkout which let’s users add ten items from different retailers. It has improved convergence rates dramatically,’ he says. Lyst’s data is available to retailers and can help them understand what consumers bought with other purchases.

Morton’s tip for the future of retail is blended online and offline journeys via mobile. ‘Communicating with the consumer can be totally personalized with an app. For example if a customer is in a city for the first time, we can plan a shopping trip for her. The personalization element allows us to give her exactly the experience she wants, based on data.’

The mall is not dead, argued J Skyler Fernandes, MD of Simon Venture Group, a retail-tech investment arm of the largest mall operator in the US. ‘The mall is at the centre of what I call the ‘mall-ennial’ community. It’s the future of conversions and will play an increasingly important role between online and offline retail,’ he said in a keynote address Fernandes cited some recent retail stats to back up his statement: e-commerce conversion rates are still only 3% v 20-30% conversions from consumers visiting physical stores; in the US, ecommerce is worth $304 billion, but traditional retail is worth $4.4 trillion.

There is a role reversal of the physical and digital retail experience, says Fernandes as e-commerce becomes engrained in the physical store (through localized fulfillment and online sales being attributed to a physical location). On the flipside, in-store retail is increasingly becoming a digital experience. A growing number of online retailers are opening brick and mortar stores, for example Bonobos, Warby Parker, Birchbox, Rent the Runway and Trunk Club. Plus we have seen Holiday stores from mega-system giants, Amazon, Google and eBay.

Malls should provide unique community experiences for shoppers that want to visit physical stores, which is still where 90% of retail sales happen, says Fernandes. These consumers love technology but they’re not shopping exclusively online, they still visit the mall and they use their mobiles for an enhanced shopping experience. Retailers need to ensure in-store mimics the online experience and they will need to upgrade their stores to include free wi-fi, beacon technology and real-time inventory that they can search for on their mobiles, while in-store.

Manipulating social media data feeds and turning them into digital creative artworks is a growing trend in retail and event spaces. Brands keen to show off their social worth and are looking to the design world for new ways to translate online conversations.

Tweet design

For its latest flagship store in Rome, Diesel partnered with POSTmatter magazine and Berlin-based artist Andreas Nicolas Fischer for a live digital artwork that draws on data from maps of of Rome as well as social media users, posting content via the hashtags #Rome, #Roma and #POSTroma.

‘The idea was to use the gallery in the store’s atrium as an ambient immersive piece that would make the audience lose their spatial perception while being completely related to the city of Rome,’ explained Yann Binet, senior art director at the POSTmatter magazine. ‘The premise of the project was to carry the DNA of Rome without trying to represent it in a literal form.’

For its sponsorship of the September Fashion Rocks music event in New York, telecoms giant Verizon collaborated with fashion designer Christian Siriano to create the world’s first couture dress inspired by a social media feed.

During the show, Verizon encouraged viewers to tweet their thoughts about the music performances and the singers’ costumes. The #SocialImprint fabric was conceived using codes for certain words to represent colour and topics of conversation to influence the pattern. Screens backstage showed the live feed, while every 30 seconds the eight most popular colours and topics were converted into print designs and fed into an industrial printer to produce rolls of fabric.

The #SocialImprint fabric by Christian Siriano for Verizon

‘If everyone is talking about Jennifer Lopez on Twitter, then the fabric is going to be dominated by that colour,’ said Siriano. ‘We’re creating this Social Imprint fabric based on the social conversations people are having and what they are reacting to throughout the event – it’s a challenge and it’s never been done before.’

The secret life of data

Fashion retailers have long tracked their customer data and the addition of e-commerce cookies makes it more relevant than ever. Creatively digital brands such as Topshop , Net-a-Porter and most recently Lyst, are choosing to visualise and display their data feeds and offer the resulting insights for the world to see.

As one of the largest global fashion e-commerce operators, Lyst has a lot of data to showcase. An inventory of over a million products, from 9000+ fashion brands and retail stores combined with the purchase power of customers that generated a record $10m in sales earlier in 2014, means the platform can drill down with its data patterns to deduce how shoppers behave online.

For an internal share-holder dinner held in July this year, Lyst asked augmented reality creative agency Holiton to visualise a snapshot of the platform’s daily data into a real-time video feed. Holition’s projection brought to life 250,000 Lyst purchases, documenting brand names, product prices, colours and key styles, so that trends from the data were easily identifiable through pattern recognition.

Showcasing data in this way brings facts and figures to life and provides a visual snapshot of consumer behaviour. Visualising big data and transforming online conversations into art and fashion is a trend to watch.

Since fashion is now shared instantly across social media, it’s no wonder how we shop for it has become more instant too. From Instagram to Pinterest and Tumblr, these platforms have become a visual marketplace for fashionistas, brands and retailers. Most important are the style leaders or ‘taste-makers’ that other users follow – and they’re the ones responsible for a new Shazam-style of shopping.

Snap it, search it, buy it

Just as another season’s month-long fashion week circus kicks off, there is a raft of new apps that target the street-style set with instant-hit fashion, at the click of a photo search. I’m calling this the ‘Shazamification of shopping’, since the practice of snapping what someone is wearing, then searching, then buying it, mimics the music identifying app Shazam. Last year Shazam announced it would broaden its service by recognising content from TV shows, so that when people ‘Shazam’ a show, they can link through to buy items worn by presenters or actors. Andrew Fisher, Shazam’s CEO, told The Guardian: “We have the ability to identify the product in a TV show so that when somebody Shazams it, they could find out where a presenter’s dress is from in one click.” Not only does this ‘search and shop’ business model look set to change the way we consume TV, it is also having an effect on how we shop for fashion.

Shazam copycats
After 26 year-old computer science graduate Jenny Griffiths launched Snap Fashion in 2012, others have followed her ground-breaking photo-search shopping app that allows users to snap an outfit or magazine editorial and search for similar items available online.

Asap54

ASAP54 launches on February 28th and is almost identical to Snap Fashion in its image-led search functionality, however it is more sophisticated in the way it allows the user to identify a type of garment or fabric to facilitate a more accurate search. Founder Daniela Cecilio previewed the app at a recent DECODED networking event and told the audience she launched ASAP54 as a way of processing what the human eye can see but with the power of an online retail database to search for items that match the visual. Apparently if you’re not happy with the algorithmically generated search results you can select an option for a ‘human’ fashion expert to step in and make suggestions and crowdsource it out to ASAP54’s social community. (ASAP54 has just announced $3million of funding and was profiled yesterday on Business Of Fashion.)

There are others following suit too. StyleEyes is another Shazam-style shopping app that allows users to snap, search and buy, organizing results into price and discounted options – any encouragement to click to purchase!

Taste-makers’ influence
Blame it on the taste-makers who pin where others follow. eBay relaunched its US home page in October with a taste-makers make over, advising users to ‘Follow It – Find It’ through the marketplace’s new hotlist of curators. The initiative (now called eBay Today) was spearheaded by Michael Philips Moskowitz, founder of taste-maker start-up Bureau of Trade who is now eBay’s chief curator and editorial director.

For some retail brands it’s a race to find the best influencers to follow. I’m a big fan of Nuji and everyone loves Lyst of course. Now even J Crew and Zara are on to tapping the ‘right’ people for their taste-graph influence. And then there was DisneyRollerGirl’s Tumblr -esque collab with Gap.

The latest trend is for shopping sites that merge the Shazam-style snap-and-search function with the influence of taste-makers. Keep is a new platform that fills the click-to-purchase gap on Instagram. Launched last month, Keep follows 100 of Instagram’s most stylish fashionistas and helps users find out where to buy the fashion they’re wearing in their posts. For example, recently Lena Dunham posted a picture of herself in a Strokes tee. On Keep users can buy the same product on Etsy, then like it, or keep it via their own Pinterest-style board on the Keep platform. It’s basically Instagram-fuelled shopping advice via the Keep staffers who do all the leg work!

Even more fashiony is MuseStyle, which also launched in January. The site’s focus is street-style stars, influential bloggers and fashion muses – you can follow their style and recommendations as well as shop the looks via unobtrusive clicks. At the moment I’m loving the on-trend posts by Natalie Kingham of Matches and the polished glamour of Taylor Tomasi-Hill.

And it was just a matter of time before the original taste-maker fashionista website, Net-a-Porter got a whole lot more social. Last fashion week The Netbook launched, letting (select) users see what others are buying, liking and admiring from a pool of visible global fashionistas, aka fellow members of the Netbook community. Alison Loehnis, managing director of Net-A-Porter, said the app was a more visual way for fashion fans to discover and shop products, inspired by the global fashion community.

Magazines merge with stores
Magazines have also jumped on the ‘search for it’ reader appeal. Lucky Magazine was the first to market in 2012 with its taste-maker shopping platform MyLuckyMag that showcases what power-users are liking, sharing and shopping for. Now, Glamour Magazine has launched a similar search and shop hashtag #GlamourFashionScanner that can be used across any of its social media feeds and is hosted on its Google+ platform. This live and direct fashion advice service allows users to search where to buy outfits they like – tapping directly into the magazine’s pool of editors for insider know-how.

But what does it all mean?
I’m watching how consumers are shopping on their mobiles for instant-hit, street-style fashion. As the traditional bi-annual fashion cycle morphs into a constant stream of newness and fashion shows are recognized more as a publicity tool than anything else, the process of shopping for style is becoming controlled by clicks and thumb scrolls. Soon that will be voice-control and hand-gestures as wearables like Google Glass become more widespread. My tip for the next phase of all this? Watch out for Glashion, launching in the US soon…